Seite - 932 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

932 An Empire Resigns to be accepted. Beneath the smoothed surface, there were repeatedly serious conflicts and rough interaction, but it was limited predominantly to official internal exchanges. Finally, calm was only restored when the Imperial and Royal armies were successful. With the gradually stronger mixing of Austro-Hungarian and German troops, a new element crept in, since the German commanders, commanding generals and com- manders-in-chief frequently did not get along with the Imperial and Royal officers, sometimes sought to enforce their views in an expressly arrogant way and evoked in this way above all with Conrad von Hötzendorf a previously almost unheard-of reac- tion : time and again, Conrad came to the defence of ‘his’ generals. The most glaring case was that of General of Cavalry Baron von Pflanzer-Baltin, Commander of the 7th Army, who had to report sick in September 1916, since the German Supreme Army Command ‘has no faith in him and therefore refuses to place German troops under his command’.2249 Neither Archduke Friedrich nor Conrad could make a stand against this, since they had to demonstrate all manner of compliance following the Brusilov Offen- sive and the Joint Supreme War Command demanded just such a sacrifice. ‘The air was thick enough to cut with a knife, as Colonel Zeynek noted. Wherever the Army High Command could steer in the opposite direction, it did so. Therefore, aside from indi- vidual cases where German and Imperial and Royal troops were deployed in one and the same theatre, i.e. predominantly in Galicia, Russia and Bukovina, and for a time also in Serbia, there were hardly any more dismissals and if there were, then they served to re-establish peace among the quarrelling allies by means of transfers. The Imperial and Royal Army High Command did not demonstrate comparable understanding to- wards the army and troop bodies on the south-western front. There, ‘drastic measures were taken’. Perhaps this was also connected to the fact that Emperor Franz Joseph had repeatedly rebuked the Army High Command for its actions against civilians and soldiers in the Galician theatre of war, but was evidently fully in agreement with the measures taken in the area of the south-western front. As a result, the army leadership and the civil administration were at one with their Monarch, who  – as the American military attaché in Vienna related following his farewell audience with the Emperor at the end of October 1916  – wanted to fight the war against Italy ‘to the end’,2250 even, if necessary, without German participation. Until September 1917, no consideration was necessary in the ‘Imperial and Royal private theatre of war’for the comrades from the north. From January 1918, after the German 14th Army had withdrawn again, the old set-up was once more valid. The change at the top of the Army High Command following the death of Emperor Franz Joseph, however, had yielded multiple consequences at once. Emperor Karl was able to settle many conflicts with the help of his Chief of Staff, Arz von Straußenburg. Not only that : in view of the temporary shortage of senior officers and above all generals, several of those who had not yet been definitively retired but only been placed on leave